Under the Harrow

"When Nora takes the train from London to visit her sister in the countryside, she expects to find her waiting at the station, or at home cooking dinner. But when she walks into Rachel's familiar house, what she finds is entirely different: her sister has been the victim of a brutal murder. Stunned and adrift, Nora finds she can't return to her former life. An unsolved assault in the past has shaken her faith in the police, and she can't trust them to find her sister's killer. Haunted by the murder and the secrets that surround it, Nora is under the harrow: distressed and in danger. As Nora's fear turns to obsession, she becomes as unrecognizable as the sister her investigation uncovers"--Provided by publisher.

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An excellent and suspenseful title from this first time author--kept me guessing till the very end. Two sisters deal with lies and deception. When one of them is murdered, was it something from their past or the present?

Once you start this book it will be hard to put down. It’s kind of like Girl on the Train in that a murder is unsolved and the twists and turns of the search for the murderer lead you in strange and different paths. Flynn Berry received the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and it is well deserved. Berry has a very creative mind in her story development.

UNDER THE HARROW is what happens when you come up with a great idea and execute it poorly: writing a character-driven novel with a partially drawn main character is never a good idea, nor is having your psychological thriller need such obvious red herrings or attempts at atmosphere.

I was mesmerized by this story. I could not put it down - I kept trying to fit my sisters into the relationship in this book and it was very disturbing, to say the least. The characters were well developed and the plot was tight. (Now if only I could remember who done it!)

I don't know how to categorize this. It's sort of a mystery, and a psychological thriller, and the language sucks you in, and it's a character novel about a nuanced relationship between two sisters. But mostly, it's uncomfortable and disturbing. I couldn't put it down.
P.S. The author pulls it all together at the end, but I had to read the last few chapters twice to understand it. I think.

Short, tense, and moody, this mystery thriller set mostly near Oxford (but with jaunts to both east and west coasts of England) focuses both on whodunnit and how-do-we-cope-with-it. A young woman discovers her sister murdered and sets about trying to find the killer. But not in the typical "amateur sleuth who turns out to be really good at sleuthing" way. It's more like if your average person, shocked and depressed by the murder of a loved one, desperately grasped for answers, both in the past and the present, any way they could. I found it emotionally and psychologically gripping, and the last quarter of the book became un-put-down-able.